Performance & Reliability

Unique feature: Data Caching Pre-fetch technology

Awesome Gallery uses multiple external image sources like Flickr, Facebook and Instagram, which means it has to contact third party servers to retrieve data. Wait, it should be really slow! And yes, contacting third party servers is a slow process, so most of other galleries use data caching to decrease the delay and not overload remote servers. But.. may be there is a better solution? Yes! Awesome Gallery not only caches all the remote data, it updates the cache in background eliminating delays when loading images.

Unique feature: Built-in support requests

Issues happen, and supporting my other plugins I found that is would be much faster if users could just send me support requests with one click including basic site configuration options saving 2 or 3 emails (“Can you please tell your site URL and what plugins do you have?”, “Do you have PHP 5.2 or PHP 5.3 installed”)? So, Awesome Gallery has a built-in support functionality.

CSS3 animations and optimised rendering

Awesome Gallery uses the best animation engine available on a client machine – jQuery animations for older browsers, and brand new CSS3 animations on modern browser-like beasts. Also, all the layout modes are optimised to cause as little layout reflows and re-renderings as possible to provide the best client side performance possible.

Data unavailable notifications

What if your image source will become unavailable for some reason? Accounts get suspended sometimes, or authentication may be reset by third party services (and they do that when the trouble strikes). Don’t worry, Awesome Gallery will still be able to show the images based on the last data available, and you’ll receive a notification message to the admin email.

CDN-ready

Many people prefer using CDNs nowadays to gain a performance boost for almost free. Awesome Gallery can work with CDNs – just need to configure CDN and put CDN domain into the corresponding settings field.

TimThumb Image caching

If you have thousands of pageviews a day, it is not fair to leech images from their original sources to show them to your visitors, so Awesome Gallery uses a TimThumb library for image resizing and caching. TimThumb is used by thousands of WordPress themes and plugins and proved itself to be fast an efficient solution.

High quality code

As end user, you probably do not care much about internals, but… If the code is quality, it usually means the potential problems will be found earlier and fixed faster without annoying “it was fixed last month and we see this ugly bug again” deja-vu’s. Awesome Gallery’s code is written using Object-Oriented PHP features, and state of the art CoffeScript meta-language that compiles into elegant JavaScript. So.. I think it is fair to tell the code is high-quality.

What about JavaScript / CSS minimisation and concatenation?

Awesome Gallery’s JavaScript / CSS code is not minimised or concatenated to make it easier to resolve problems if any. When the site is ready for launch – you can just install one of the minimisation plugins (Better WordPress Minify is highly recommended) and voila – not only Awesome Gallery’s CSS and Javascripts will be minimised and concatenated, but all the files!